Bill Etra, Inventor Who Helped Make Video an Art Form, Dies at 69

Bill Etra on Ward’s Island in New York in 2007.Credit...Benton C. Bainbridge

By Daniel E. Slotnik

Sept. 1, 2016

Bill Etra, an artist and inventor who, with a partner, created a video animation system in the early 1970s that helped make videotape a more protean and accessible medium for many avant-garde artists, died on Aug. 26 near his home in the Bronx. He was 69.

The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Rozalyn Rouse Etra. Mr. Etra had spinal stenosis for many years and was mostly bedridden when he died.

Mr. Etra and Steve Rutt created the Rutt/Etra video synthesizer, an analog device studded with knobs and dials that let a user mold video footage in real time and helped make video a more expressive art form.

Among the artists who used it were Nam June Paik, regarded by many as the father of video art, and Woody and Steina Vasulka, who founded the Kitchen performance space in downtown Manhattan in 1971.

Video was used mostly by professionals to shoot documentary or news footage in the late 1960s, and studios were able to manipulate video images to add special effects or animations. But the machines they used were too large and prohibitively expensive for most artists.

The Rutt/Etra was one of the first synthesizers to allow an artist to play with a video signal in real time. One could focus, zoom in and out, control the horizontal and vertical positions of the image, and create animations and special effects.

The synthesizer cost a bit more than $12,000 (the equivalent of about $70,000 today) — still pricey but far less than the available alternatives.

Mr. Etra used the Rutt/Etra to create intimate work, like “Heartbeat,” in which Louise Etra, his wife at the time, is seen sitting with a monitor over her heart. An animated red circle beats in time with her pulse, which intensifies when Mr. Etra kisses her.

The analog technology of Mr. Etra’s synthesizer has long since been outdated by digital techniques, but a version of it survives as a plug-in available to Apple computers. Mr. Etra explained the rationale behind his machine on the plug-in’s web page.

“The dream was to create a compositional tool that would allow you to prepare visuals like a composer composes music,” Mr. Etra wrote. “I called it then and I call it now the ‘visual piano,’ because with the piano the composer can compose an entire symphony and be sure of what it will sound like. It was my belief then, and it is my belief now after 40 years of working towards this, that this will bring about a great change and great upwelling of creative work once it is accomplished.”

William Etra was born in Manhattan on March 27, 1947, and grew up in Lawrence, N.Y. He attended the Henley School in Queens and then Hofstra University, where he met Mr. Rutt, who died in 2011. Mr. Etra went on to New York University, where he started teaching experimental television before he graduated.

An early version of their synthesizer was used by the Television Laboratory of WNET Channel 13 in New York. Mr. Etra’s artwork is housed in the permanent collections of several museums, and he has also worked as a consultant for companies like Warner-Atari and Sun Microsystems.